Top p3

British Gas is to inform its 11 million customers that their gas bills are going to rise by as much as 25% as the company, which supplies more than half of all UK households, tries to pass on some of the recent jump in the wholesale cost of gas.

Top p4

Protesters in London who carried placards threatening suicide bombings and massacres in revenge for the Danish cartoons satirising the prophet Muhammad are to be investigated by Scotland Yard and could face arrest. By Owen Bowcott.

National news p14

Marcel Berlins: Every year, an enterprising American issues an entertaining list of candidates for the Stella awards, purporting to be a list of the most outrageous examples of lawsuits for compensation that have been before US courts

The UK government must intervene on behalf of nine British residents being held without trial at the US Guantánamo Bay detention centre, Amnesty International urges today in a report on the impact on inmates' families.

International news p16

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's provocation of the west has become his trademark and yesterday Iran's hardline president echoed the defiant rhetoric of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the country's Islamic revolution, towards America during the 1979-81 Tehran embassy siege.

Interpol was on worldwide alert yesterday after 13 al-Qaida militants convicted of attacking the American warship USS Cole and French supertanker Limburg escaped from jail in Yemen along with 10 other prisoners, according to a government-run website.

President Hugo Chávez extended his verbal war with Washington, likening George Bush to Adolf Hitler in an obvious rebuff to the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who last week compared Mr Chávez himself to Hitler.

International news p19

A year ago the Guardian set out to track the west's promises of action for Africa on aid, trade, health and debt relief. As G8 finance ministers meet this week, our special report examines whether those commitments have been met.

International news p22

International news p23

Leaders of America's women's movement were in mourning yesterday for Betty Friedan, whose broadside in her book, The Feminine Mystique, against the 1950s ideal of a suburban domestic bliss gave voice to modern feminism.

Leader: Lucky or sinister numbers are a feature of most cultures. But in modern societies the symbolic power of round numbers can take on a significance that would once have been the preserve of religious ritual or doctrine.

Leader: For years there has been something oddly dear to the national psyche about shared chores, spartan dormitories and the espionage of hiding the car out of sight of the warden - all characteristics of the traditional family visit to a youth hostel.

Letters: Following Eric Allison's report (Barbaric trips endured by pregnant prisoners, February 1), we ask the home secretary to put an immediate stop to transporting pregnant women in the prison vans known to inmates as "sweatboxes".